Cloud computing involves the use of hardware and software resources to provide services over a network. In many cloud computing models, the responsibility of providing and maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure falls on the cloud service provider. By shifting these responsibilities to the cloud service provider, organizations or individuals may quickly access complex systems and applications without incurring the upfront costs of acquiring the supporting infrastructure. Another benefit of cloud computing is that resources may be shared by multiple tenants, which improves scalability and reduces the costs of the underlying infrastructure.
Multiple cloud service providers offer services to tenants. A cloud service provider may provide cloud storage services for storing data. A cloud service provider may provide processing resources for processing data. A particular tenant may use resources across multiple cloud providers.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.